I don’t have anyone’s obituary set to go. There’s no obit on file for anyone still among the living in Madison County — at least not at our paper. What a morbid kind of task, right?

But news organizations sometimes prepare obituaries before the death of famous people so they can have them ready to publish at a moment’s notice. I’m sure there are files like this for an array of famous Americans right now, such as any president, any Hall-of-Fame athlete, any big-time Hollywood star, any highly acclaimed literary or music figure, any widely known business person.

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death 50 years ago this month. But when he died, his obituary was already eight years old at The New York Times, which had long been prepared for his death. The paper and King himself had both thought he might meet a violent end.

“The paper first prepared one (an obit) in 1960, when King was all of 31 years old,” wrote David Margolick, a former NYT reporter. “Only the dateline and the lead paragraph, detailing the circumstances of his demise, were omitted. In this sense, The Times and King were congruent long before April 4, 1968: Each had anticipated his early, and violent, death.”

There are so, so many broad things that can be said on the subject of race and America and of MLK and his murder. These hard subjects will forever be part of our story. But the first-hand telling of King’s murder fell on one man the day of his death. Only one journalist, Earl Caldwell, the first black reporter The New York Times assigned to cover the Civil Rights leader, was present April 4, 1968 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when King was shot dead on a balcony.

Caldwell wrote about what happened shortly after the shooting. He said he was in room 215 of the motel, just under the balcony where King had stood, when the shot rang out, sounding like a bomb. Caldwell said moments before the shooting he had been irritated with the motel’s poor phone service, because he needed to file a story. He said the room was warm and he had the door cracked. A Coke bottle had busted outside of his room and startled him.

Here’s how he described the moment:

“For some reason I had been jumpy when the bottle fell. I ran to the door, thinking it was a shot or something.
“Then came the blast. Before any commotion or before I heard anything I knew that something was wrong and went for the door that was still partially opened.
“I saw people jumping around in the courtyard in front of the balcony. My first thought was that someone had set off a firecracker. ‘Man, what a lousy joke,’ I thought at first. Then the events began to close in.
“This car, it raced across the black-top yard [which was also a parking lot] toward my room and then stopped and went back and then lurched forward again. It stopped again and the Negro man sitting inside at the wheel was rocking back and forth with his hands at his head now and screaming ‘Oh no, oh no, oh no.’ I yelled at him: ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter? What’s going on?’ But he never answered or before he could someone else was yelling: ‘They shot him. They shot him.’”

Caldwell wrote that Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy held King’s head and tried to talk to him. The reporter recalled his own thoughts in the moment.
“The blood. The wound was as big as your fist. His eyes. They were open but they had such a strange look. Eyes that were not seeing anything. I thought he was unconscious.
“‘Write. Write, write down everything you see,’ I thought. I began to jot down on paper who was there, what they were doing, time, what they were saying. ‘Get it all down, get it all down,’ and then a second thought: phone. Call the office, call the office I kept thinking. I hustled down the stairs and started for my room but about half-way I remembered that the phones were busy. I remembered one at the other end of the motel and I started to run in that direction.
“Suddenly there were all of these police with shotguns and unholstered pistols and they seemed to be coming from across the street, from the direction where the shot had been fired. I remember a cop coming up to me grabbing my arm and asking which way did the shot come from. ‘Across the street, I think. Over there. I don’t know. I don’t know.’
“Again I remembered the phone and started to run in that direction. Change. A dime. I had two nickels in my pocket. I felt out of breath but I remember methodically calling the operator. ‘I’d like to make a credit card call to New York ... area code 212-556-7356. Martha.’ Martha answered. ‘Martha, I’d like to speak to Claude, it’s an emergency. Claude answered quickly but when he did I couldn’t talk. All of a sudden, I was out of breath. Finally I blurted it out. ‘King’s been shot.’”

I read a New York Times story a few days ago about Caldwell’s experience. I could write a lot on this subject matter, but I won’t now. Instead, I’m thinking about the one reporter alone at the scene of an assassination. It’s intriguing, as a reporter, to read about his thoughts. I know that emergency workers must try to eliminate their inner jolts of emotion as they do their job. That can actually be true for journalists, too, in trying times. I’ve never been in a situation remotely close to Caldwell’s, but I’ve had my emotions racing through my body as I try to think straight and take down the facts.

Caldwell was the first one to get the word out to the world about what happened in Memphis. I found it interesting that he declined to comment for the recent story about that day. I imagine there’s a world of emotion in that memory.

But the history of that day resonates even now. And he was the first to write it. I had never heard of Caldwell until this past week. I thought it was a story worth sharing.